Game engines you liked but which dont deliver

We've all bought the thing that was supposed to let you write that master piece, but it remains unwritten, due to finding the gotcha after seeing the demo and buying that Bad Boy.

Name and shame them here, so others can be warned. Tell us what was actually wrong with it. You can even save someone all the hassle of downloading the often "rigged" demo.

Name: AMOS3D
What's wrong with it: Its crap.

:)

ROTFLMAO @ Gfk...

yeah... what's the deal with that thing...

:)

actually, i have fond memories of my experiences with AMOS... lots of fun back then...

--Mike

AMOS yeah, it was great - especially AMOS Pro.

AMOS3D and its object modeller are just... well... there are no words.

It would only let you have a handful (6, i think) primitives for your entire 3D world. Modification of primitives was limited to moving vertices and edges. You could not create vertices/edges/faces.

The whole thing was a completely pointless exercise. I think Francois Lionet must have a bit of shrapnel lodged somewhere from his days in the French Legion to think that releasing this 'mess' was a good idea.

Oh, and it was far easier just to say "its crap".

Game engines you liked but which dont deliver?

Hm, this seems suspiciously similar to my own wonderful Games you loved but with hindsight seem terrible topic to me, but with a game-enginey twist. Ooh, you little thief! For shame.

Do I get royalty payments?

Anyway, in answer to your slightly, and yet blatantly, plaguarised question: Dark Basic

Darkbasic classic - everything went "smooth" until I tried getting collisions to work, then it really showed its real face.

AMOS3D - It was a stinker. I didn't get past the turning commands not working the way I expected. If I would have had more 3D math knowledge I could have gotten it to work, but I bought it so I wouldn't need the 3D math knowledge...

Re: Dbasic: The "REAL FACE" is the one with two cheeks??? ;)

I liked the look of Yeti3D but they went nowhere with it....
I liked CLEAN (well I liked some of the ideas) http://www.cs.ru.nl/~clean/
I liked CUBE but I think it has too steep a learning curve : http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
I could never get anything to work that was made with NeHe : http://nehe.gamedev.net/data/downloads/download.asp?letter=A :: http://nehe.gamedev.net/
The Delengine was interesting but seems to have slowed down a bit : http://www.delgine.com/
(and turned into a mapeditor etc.)

I met Francois Lionet recentely, he seemed like a great guy but I must agree with the comment on AMOS 3D. AMOS Pro was tops though.

Jason.

JustLuke,

Well it was sorta ripped, but not completely: RedOkt posted about BV, and I asked what it was like as I have gotten a little jaundiced by demos by now. Then I saw your post about games that seemed like a good idea at the time, and the two sort of merged as a concept. Seemed the obvious thing to do really! ;O)

I reckon they work well together and suppose there might be other "seemed like a good idea at the time" threads yet to come! :O)

Yeah, AMOS 3D sucked. I loved AMOS and AMOS Pro, pre-Blitz 2.0, and I purchased numerous (third party) add-ons for it; TOME was pretty good.

I never quite found my feet with PureBasic. I'm sure it does deliver - I simply never felt compelled to invest time in it once I'd purchased it (actually Fred gave it to me for free).

In terms of 3d engines the only ones I've used for any amount of time are, in the order of purchasing, Darkbasic Classic, Blitz3d, Torque (including RTS starter pack). Of these I'm more than happy with Blitz3d (though use blitzplus more these days), haven't touched Dark Basic Classic for years (beyond occasionally using the textures that came on the CD) and gave up on Torque - more my own limitations than Torque's.

So I'd have to say for me Darkbasic Classic was the worst of the bunch I've used by far primarily because I still don't knnow how to make animated 3d models for it, its 2d mode is rubbish as sprites 'slide' out of position, its mathematical functions are off (try returning the arctangent of 1 - should return 45 degrees instead returns something like 43.xx or someother woefully inaccurate estimate - and it is still slower than any other language I've used in doing so), other things with Darkbasic Classic were that version 1.13 which was the latest at the time I left it did not run under Win95 (obviously not much of an issue now but at the time it was) - the in built IDE runs at 640x480, even simple code such as creating a cube could cause a total system lock up on some days, no way of creating meshes in code vertex by vertex.

Torque was a disappointment for me, but that is more my own limitation - the engine is just too big for me to make something I'd like to play, and I don't play first person shooters (or any game these days come to think of it - except those old classic retro cds for XBOX).

Oh..forgot one - 3d Construction Kit by Domark - sure it ran on my XT but was a big disappointment, but at the time I was a kid with overambitious ideas....

Did you have any joy with the AGA or Intuition extensions?

I never got either to work reliably.

The AGA stuff worked fine on my A1200 and A500+ (at least that's how I remember it), but I never tried the Intuition library. The only AGA stuff I ever released was a Tetris clone (yawn).

C64 SEUCK never lived up to my expectations. I remember reading In Zzap! magazine that it was going to have power ups, but those features never made it into the final release. Sucky...

What's he doing these days?

I had STOS3D. It was pretty dreadful. Even with one basic cube on screen I think it only managed about 12fps. My hopes of creating the next Starglider II were shattered.

A5 Engine
bought the basic one at a store because it sounded good but I had to find out quite fast, that most is bla and that you have to spend another 500$ to get a version that supports stuff that has been "must have stuff" for years ...

Wow, I forgot I even bought Amos3d until this mention. That was some time ago, but yeah it was just terribly slow and hard to use and I don't think I ever even made anything with it at all. But AMOS Pro itself was good for a while.

Hmm i would add Blitzmax here as like some other people i've only bought it because of the 3d module which still isn't out yet. And Gamebench of course which looked very promising but got canceled. And an early one from Amiga days was the Bard's Tale Construction Kit. Well in reality...puhhh.... ;O)

The C64 version was OK but very limited. The Amiga release was an absolute stinker, though.

@teamonkey

He`s busy with MultiMedia Fusion 2. Check out the site, it`s just been released.

http://www.clickteam.com/eng/index.php

It`s actually a pretty decent program if you want to make 2D games and a big improvement over the original. It`s another point and click game maker of course but is lots of fun to play with.

Jason.

@Taumel.. Gotta disagree on the BMax front - have you tried BMax with some of the recent development tools ??

I only bought BMax after trialling a recent Game framework... I'll come clean and be Frank - I could ill afford the time to develop the polished framework a 3rd party has presented in BMax.

I did play with Blitz 3D for some hours (understatement), I have nothing but praise for the sheer rate at which you can develop a (given time - potentially..?) stable product with BMax and 3rd party development tools.

Hi,

it's not that i need a framework. What i once wanted is a new up to date 3d engine for offline work which works on win and osx. That's the reason i've bought it for. Buy max, learn how things work and after the 3d module is released use it. Well, problem is that it's still not here. How much time passed since then? I feel older now... ;O)

FPS Creator.

I had *big* dreams of making a huge FPS game... you know, big terrains, advanced AI, all that sort of things. FPSC seemed ideal... then yousit down and try to use it.

All the stock media and models... ok, but doing something original with it was hard. The editor was innovative but hard to use. The ai and scripting... well, lets just say that my ZX-81 had a fuller instruction set (and logic, for that matter). To be fair, a number of people have made some good editors to create new stuff for the thing, and there are one or two stunning productions done with it, but in general every game looks just the same.

Oh, and there's no way to save a game.

Aurora :(

AMOS3D - Utter rubbish!

AMOSPro on the other hand was superb. I won AMOSPro in an Amos programming competition (Amiga Format) I think it was. I couldn't believe it when this massive box get delivered to me. A shiny box and a huge well constructed manual, ahhh them were the days.

Torque, Aurora, and Blitzmax without 3rd party addons.

Hmm, well I'm going to be controversial too and say Blitzmax.

It seemed like a great idea at the time, it took ages coming out, it arrived. It's been out a while now and things seems to be just mulling over.

Slightler cleaner coding practices, but it's still slow, pretty unreliable and it didn't make cross platform compatibilty a breeze. I've still yet to find a use for it whilst I work for 3 weeks converting my 20000 lines of code into Blitz3D and quads instead.

I also bought Amiga SEUCK which after an hour's worth of fun you think my god this is so limited. I can't even load images in Deluxe Paint 4!

Starglider... what a game..

Anyone done any re-makes on the PC?

These are the indie engines / languages that iv'e used in the past, to try and complete a certain type of game project iv'e always wanted to do, but the language or engine didn't quite deliver for one reason or another.

The type of game was / is a more advanced / up -to-date or better (gameplay wise ;-) survival horror game than Resident Evil 1-3, or Nocturne was. (2D-Pre Rendered backdrops with 3D characters tech (pretty old now i know).

* c++ / DirectX (i.e my own game engine), at that time, which is now going back 4-5 years ago, i didn't have enough experience, to write the needed 3dsmax exporters by myself.

* 3DRAD - i won't bore you with my experience with this one ;-)

* Which then lead to Conitec Game Studio. I e-mailed the support at conitec before buying, and asked if this engine could do this tech. One of the guys there, wrote a lengthy e-mail back to me saying that 2D-Pre rendered backdrops with 3D was fully supported in Game Studio, and that they had their own 3dsmax exporters, to export the camera, and other needed info for this type of project etc.

After paying almost 150 UK pounds (for the commercial version), and several e-mails back and forth after realising the engine was mainly for FPS/Doom type games, i got on the telephone to speak to one of them.

LOL, he actually admitted that whoever gave me that info (about this tech being fully supported) was mistaken. Still, he refused to give me a refund even after sending him copies of the emails with the replies stating the engine supported this tech from his collegues.

That's when i met a german guy called Michael Hartlef (he is a user here (a decent guy) who developed an IDE for Blitz, I-Basic etc etc) called IndeED. He had written several plug-ins for Game Studio at that time, so i e-mailed him to try to find out if one of his his plug-ins could do what i needed.

He was an experienced user with Game Studio and told me that what i was trying to do, wasn't possible with it back then . Wev'e been very good friends ever since.

He was the guy who suggested trying a language called Blitz3D. I'd never heard of it before.

At that time i had also just bought Dark Basic Pro - again, i won't bore you with details you probably already know of.

Blitz3D is the only language /game engine API (up to this point) that i have truly had success with in creating the type of game that i set out to do, (hopefully within a few months the finished game will be released :-)

* WinterMute Engine
Just for old style point and click games, no SDK available to extend, and was told by the main developer, it's only for point + click adventure games.

* Something possesed me ( a few months back) to buy a license for Beyond Virtual. To cut a long story short, i ended up requesting a refund, the documentation was non existent, the examples were terrible, the support was the worst i'd ever experienced.

BlitzMax (although i own it), in honesty, i haven't really had time to really use / try that much, as iv'e been too busy with trying to get this game finished in B3D.

But again, being honest, from what i have seen so far (by mainly reading these forums) there is not a very big reason for me to choose BMax over C# or even c++ and managed DX for my next (full )3D project (complexity wise).

Anyway, that's my (long), story.

Cheers,

Lee.

Thanks for that Lee, you've been through the mill too by the look of things.

Having thought over and re-read your moves I'd only add that if you'd opt for Lightwave instead of 3dsmax then the exporter to DirectX exists as a plugin which is free, so now you can set yourself free on that score! It was avalable a tthe time too.

I'm also gladdened to note that B3D comes out of all that pretty well too in general terms.

There's more than one or two "iffy" engines out there by the looks of this thread. Any more for, well, any more?

Not to be a nitpicker, but BlitzMax is not slow, far from it. Max2D is slow, yes, but that's a big difference from BMax being slow. For the most part, BlitzMax is as fast as C++ or C#, in other words, it's as fast as you're likely to care about. But Max2D is indeed slow. And not looking like getting any faster any time soon.

DarkBasic Pro, Torque Shader Engine, BlitzMax

DIV Games Studio

It's once promising.... and then gone, no longer any Windows port available.

DarkBasic.

No. In fact it's nearly twice as fast as Blitz3D.

If by slow you mean one of the fastest, then yes.

If BM=slow
  print "You either used OpenGL or have a really craptastic card (-> Intel, S3 or SiS)"
  print "Wait for Max3D as we hopefully get a DX9 driver for Max2D by then as well"
  print "until then, realize that INTEL DOES NOT CREATE 3D CARDS!"
else
  Print "congratulation, you realized that 3D needs a 3D card. Viva ATI and NVIDIA"
endif

> but BlitzMax is not slow
> But Max2D is indeed slow.

Cheers for clearing that up :)

> No. In fact it's nearly twice as fast as Blitz3D.

-fast +slow

> If by slow you mean one of the fastest, then yes.

No fair, B3D wasn't entered in that contest.

If you have any tangible evidence to support that claim I'd love to see it. Until then, here is a bit of proof in favour of my arguement: http://www.m2p.dk/bb-bmx-firedemo.zip

Not only is the BlitzMAX demo faster (as-in generates more particles) it's also doing more than 4 times the work.

That's because Blitz3D sucks.

Blitz3d is in that contest, and appears in several of the results. For example (post #49)
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showpost.php?p=98469&postcount=49

bmax using DX (window) - 636 fps - (full) - 1150
bmax using GL (window) - 596 - (full) - 676
blitz3d (window) - 253

Unfortunately let's just add unity to the list...

If there is a team around who is thinking about if there is a need for the perfect gamedev tool for indie and client work, then i would say yes. Look what's out so far, learn from the mistakes of the other products and try to do better. Each one i own at the moment lacks in different disciplines...

awwwwwwwww... c'mon now 'duck...

--Mike

For 2D you might forgot PureBasic v4....

Yeah, Blitz3D is great but it hardly delivers nowadays.

Blitz3D is a great tool and always will be. I still use it over BMax as do many others on this site.

Newer isn`t always better.

Jason.

Dark Basic (re-branded as "classic" these days) was a let down for me, money wasted. But the first one have to be a "3D world builder creator" something that I bought when 486 processor was considered "top of the line"... I think Gomark published it but can't remember what the program was called. It was utterly crap though, buggy and limited... hey wait, did I just describe DB? :)

[sarcasm]I will have you know that The Games Factory is an incredible tool for ANY SERIOUS MASTER PROGRAMMER out there that wishes to create PC games![/sarcasm]

Assuming said programmer wants to create PONG and BREAKOUT styled games... Simple idiot platformers... and everything you could do in Blitz with just a little more effort and imagination!

Ironically, the folks at the TV3D forums feels the same way with people who use Blitz, 3DGamestudio, DB...etc.

But the point is that they were actually able to make a game with it....and less than half the time it took wih Blitz...just using a few mouse clicks. Would gamers/end users really care what it was made in?

Of course not - if it works etc. Another problem is that although it is easy to create games with few mouse clicks you're railroaded to do certain kind of games. No "spore" or similar innovative stuff. Ppl can play "Pong" and "Breakout" only so many times before they want something more complex. Same applies to "fps creators".

Both good points! and for the record I like BANANOID (breakout type game that I saw tooo little of (3 levels in demo)